In the month that Britain marks the centenary of the first votes for women, a Nottingham exhibition tells the stories of the suffragettes who struggled for their rights … and the men who supported the cause.

But not as an isolated moment in history. The National Justice Museum’s five-month show Right to Vote puts the women’s suffrage campaign into the context of 800 years of debate and conflict over the representation of the people.

It’s a time span that takes us from Magna Carta in 1215 to the questions of whether 16-year-olds, migrants and prisoners should get the vote in 2018.

“This year it was essential to mark the anniversary, but it was likely that every museum would want to do the same,” said Bev Baker, senior curator and archivist at the National Museum of Justice.

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“So instead of focusing only on the women’s suffrage movement we decided to make it a much broader exhibition, going back further into the past but also thinking about contemporary issues.”

Once visitors to the gallery find themselves examining 19th-century material the women’s votes issue seems to emerge naturally from wider male-led campaigns for social change, such as Chartism, and the clamour for better parliamentary representation for the middle and lower classes.

Thus the exhibition follows the slow and painful process of modern electoral evolution, which began in 1832 with the First Reform Act. Others Acts followed in 1867 and 1884, gradually broadening the electorate.

Inside the Right to Vote exhibition at The National Justice Museum (Image: Joseph Raynor)

Reform continued with the Representation of the People Act 1918, whose centenary fell last week. It was not just about enfranchising women – rather, some women. The act gave the vote to every man aged 21 or older, and to women only if they happened to be 30-plus and owned, either in their own right or through their husbands, property worth £5.

That was tough on poorer working women, Nottingham Trent University’s Dr Annalise Grice told the audience at the launch of the exhibition. They had also campaigned, but they would have to wait for the so-called “Equal Franchise” Act of 1928, which extended the vote to all women aged 21-plus, and never mind if they owned no property.

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After 1928, the next UK-wide reform came in 1970, when the vote became the right of all men and women aged 18 and over.

The National Justice Museum’s exhibition introduces us to local heroines like Eileen Casey, who was inspired to join the Women’s Social and Political Union by the oratory of Emmeline Pankhurst.

Pankhurst was the party founder and the most prominent of all suffragettes, not to be confused with suffragists. The latter opted for peaceful campaigning. Suffragettes resorted to direct action, and Casey was typical. She smashed windows and in 1913 was suspected of arson in Derbyshire.

Senior Curator Bev Baker pictured at the Right to Vote exhibition at The National Justice Museum (Image: Joseph Raynor)

Other prominent campaigners were Lady Violet Markham, who stood unsuccessfully for the Mansfield seat at the 1918 General Election, and Helena Dowson, who as a speaker endured her share of missiles and heckling.

In a man’s world, many males who sympathised with the women’s suffrage campaign would have kept their views to themselves.

But not all. The Eastwood-born novelist DH Lawrence attended rallies - his fiancee Louie Burrows was a suffrage supporter - and Helena Dowson’s father chaired Nottingham’s first women’s suffrage meeting. The lawyer Charles Lambert Rothera, one of a family line of coroners, set up the Nottingham branch of the Men’s League for Suffrage and provided office space in Bridlesmith Gate for the WSPU.

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He also wrote letters of protest, published in the Nottingham Post, against the practice of force-feeding women hunger strikers such as Eileen Casey.

And if one exhibit sums up the trials endured by suffragettes, it is one drawn from the museum’s own collection of artefacts. It is a nasty bit of kit - a ceramic feeding bowl with a screw mechanism and a long rubber tube.

The mood of the age was captured at the exhibition launch event, in one of the museum’s old Shire Hall courtrooms, in the music of Madeleina Kay. The Sheffield-based protest chanteuse made European headlines last autumn when she gate-crashed a Brexit conference in Brussels wearing a Supergirl costume.

Madeleina Kay performs at the exhibition launch at the National Justice Museum (Image: Niall Browne)

She is as inspired by the struggles of British women a century ago as she is today by citizens who wish Britain to stay in the EU.

Other exhibits at the free-to-see exhibition include a truncheon that was once deployed at the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when 15 perished and at least 4000 were injured when mounted troops charges after a crowd of 50,000 protestors.

“The exhibit is a reminder of what can happen when people set out to protest peacefully and find things getting out of control,” said Bev Baker.

Closer to home is a reminder of Nottingham’s reform Bill riots of 1831, when Nottingham Castle was torched: a contemporary “broadside” – a sheet of paper printed on one side – depicting the execution of three of the rioters on the steps of the very building which hosts the exhibition.

And as a reminder that the issue of who gets to vote is far from over, visitors can cast their own votes in ballots on whether the UK franchise should be extended to 16 and 17-year-olds; to migrants and refugees, and to occupants of Her Majesty’s Prisons.

Two days after the exhibition opened, a glance at the division of tokens in the see-through ballot boxes shows opinion to be equally divided.